Ive just recently bought the adobe cloud, and was wanting to switch from FCP to premiere cs6. But...... first thing ive notices is how terribly slow it is scrubbing through footage on the timeline. Playback is fine, but scrubbing through footage and trying to find an inpoint is painful. Also, one of the biggest draw cards was the ability to edit native files from the Canon 5D mk2. This is even worse! Once again, playback is fine, but scrubbing through the timeline is just terrible. I didn't have this problem in FCP... is there something i'm doing wrong?

I don't use the cloud, we just did the switch about a year ago and bought a hard copy during the special switch deal. You need lots of RAM, fast hard drives and and a CUDA card. We have in our macpro a Nvidia 4000, 12 gigs ram running a 4 drive RAID 0 via eSATA. Just a basic system. cs 5.5 was a dog on the macpro before the CUDA card, but CS6 is much better without CUDA until you have a bunch of filters. etc.

CS6 has been very very buggy and it seems just now that things are stabilizing.

5d is H.264 which is a challenging codec, but we have found it works (5d, AVCCAM, GoPro...) but JKL is not near as fluid as FCP with this footage, but much better w/cs6 and fast everything, as mentioned. We did a test and converted a project to prores and it was super smooth, but we really want to work natively. all the best!

The short answer: spend hundreds or over a thousand dollars on one of the few outdated Nvidia cards with CUDA that work in a Mac.

The long answer: ditch the Mac and assemble a PC with top of the line components. I was a Mac devotee until I realized that I could have a computer faster than any Mac if I bought high quality components and put it together myself. You don't need to have a degree in computer science, just some knowledge that you can easily acquire online. The three Macs I had all had different problems and were no better than brand PCs that sold for about 3/4s of the price. They were of course better than the piece of junk Dells or Compaqs that sold at Walmart for $400, or even the $1,200 models, but I got fed up with paying top dollar for a product that didn't deserve it.

The graphics and video industry has this very erroneous notion that if you want to do anything serious in those fields you need a Mac. At one point many years ago that was true, but it hasn't been for several years now. Apple is making the bulk of their money with the iPhones, iPads and iEverything else but Mac towers, so that line has been almost abandoned completely. The exterior is still a design from 2002, and the interior from 2010. The "renewed" 2012 models are a joke, a tiny speed bump and you have to pay $5,000 if you want one that is barely decent. Even worse, even though in recent years Adobe Premiere and many plugins started making extensive use of CUDA technology, Mac Pros still come with only choices of outdated Radeon cards, which are only good for games and maybe some stuff in After Effects but that's it. If you want any sort of an Nvidia card in a Mac, you have to spend thousands on one of the few Quadros that are compatible with Macs, all of them outdated cards, unless you download a hacked driver to make any Nvidia card work, but I wouldn't trust my editing workstation to a hacked driver.

On the PC side, you have several more choices. You can put together a system that will be equal or faster or to any MacPro. To give you an idea, my current system, which has an Intel i7 3930k CPU (six cores at 3.2 GHz but that go up to 4 Ghz each with Turbo), 32 GB of Corsair RAM, and an Nvidia GTX570 graphics card, gives me a Cinebench R11.5 score of 52.91 fps for Open GL and 11.28 pts for CPU render. I was just reading a forum in which a guy that ran the same version of Cinebench on his MacPro with the dual 2.40 Ghz 6 core CPUs(that's 12 physical cores) and what I assume is the stock Radeon graphics card gets 30.75 fps OpenGL and 12.5 CPU. The MacPro may be marginally faster for CPU render than my machine, but much slower for GPU, which is almost as important these days. And checking the current prices at the Apple store, he paid at least $3,800 for that computer, while I paid less than $2,000 for mine.

Five years ago I started assembling my computers, and they have been the fastest and most reliable computers I've ever had. Better than any Mac or brand PC I've ever had, and with the advantage that every two or three years I can upgrade it and still use some components, instead of having to buy a whole new computer like you would do with a Mac.

The only downside to self assembled PCs currently is that as long as Microsoft keeps selling Windows 7 Pro, you're fine, but if they stop and you have to install that abomination of technology that is Windows 8, then the choice is not so clear. But, Windows XP was released in 2001 and millions of computers around the world still use it just fine, so I don't see MS ending sales of Windows 7 anytime soon, because Windows 8 is a toy for tablets, but as a professional desktop OS is a joke, and I'm sure that the hundreds of articles and angry forum posts online about it must have reached them. But at least for now, the choice is very clear, stay away from Apple and go with self assembled PCs, and if you don't know how to assemble one, there are small businesses that do it for you. Believe me, anybody who has the intelligence to edit video can assemble a PC, it's no more complicated than it was to assemble a Lego kit when you were 7.

Assuming there are no major system issues preventing proper functioning of the machine, the largest single factor that will make things snappier is the CPU. With that media, an i7 3770K or an i7 3930K are the best options, with a minimum 16 or 12 GB of RAM respectively.

Hard drives and CUDA cards will help very little with simple playback of this media. The CPU is the deciding factor here.

While she does not do video editing, she DOES use the new Win8 start screen as a menu... with any non-APP program icon jumping over to the old style desktop to run

When a program install puts an oversize icon on the start screen, it still runs the program the same as in my Win7

I have no reason to upgrade my computer (works well for me) but I do understand how SHE likes Win8 just because of the new start screen... and the fact that "traditional" non-APP programs still run in the "classic" desktop memory space

Have you used it yet? I find only small differences between 8 and 7 myself, with most of those differences being improvements over 7.

Are you sure you're using Windows 8? I mean, anybody who uses it, whether they love it or hate it, would have to agree that it's the most drastic departure from all previous versions of Windows and far from "small differences". It has a gazillion differences and most of them are for the worse. Unlike previous versions of Windows, I haven't pre-ordered it, I haven't bought it when it came out, because I had used a pre-release version that had the final version of the GUI and I found it absolutely horrible. Not only horrible in usability, but horrible in looks. The Metro GUI is not hideous, it's half decent for tablets, but the new skin for the desktop looks like they had a contest to see which was the most horrible skin and they used the one that won. Windows was never good looking compared to Mac OS, but up to 7 it was tolerable. Looking at that new desktop makes my eyes bleed, it's like being married to Snookie.

I'm quite sure. Have been since August. Once you're in the Desktop, which is where I stay, Windows 8 is very much like Windows 7, with only small differences. In fact, XP to 7 was a much larger change than 7 to 8.

the new skin for the desktop looks like they had a contest to see which was the most horrible skin and they used the one that won.

That's really my only complaint about Windows 8. It's just not as flashy as 7 was. I liked the flash, and have a desktop system powerful enough to run it, so there's really no reason to remove it entirely just because some small percentage of Windows 8 users will be on a tablet, which runs on battery.

But that's really a very small issue, and entirely cosmetic. What functionality has changed I find to be largely an improvement over 7.

My major complaint about Win8 is the increased security measures, requiring extra steps to circumvent them. For most users this is a non-issue, but in more complex environments with networking, domains, VPN's, active directory, VM's, user profiles in non-standard locations, using Chrome instead of FireFox, there are serious downsides to Win8, but time will give us sufficient tools to get around these obstacles. Missing drivers is another one, but hey, that is expected with a new OS.

I'm thinking PC is the way to go. I still have my macbook pro, but I'd love to sell everything apple, and move to a powerful PC & Adobe rather than any apple products. I also want a small sized laptop for out and about, do you think Premiere will run ok on the Samsung Series 9 13.3 inch laptop? I will need a laptop, but it doesn't need to be a powerhouse. I also hear ASUS is ok too for a small laptop.

Actually that is absolutely normal for scrubbing on almost every NLE, even on a fast machine. Especially when you have a one hour long sequence zoomed to one screen and you're going back and forth. I would say only Edius would be able to show you faster scrubbing than that, since Premiere was never particularly good at scrubbing, but if you zoom in a few times scrubbing should be smoother and allow you to choose In and Out points to lift or extract.

If you were on a PC you could install a nice Nvidia card with lots of CUDA cores and RAM, but that wouldn't speed up scrubbing when you are zoomed out to one hour of footage, and I doubt that FCP does any better than that or any other NLE for that matter, unless it's 480i DV footage or at the most DVCProHD.

Of course, if you are zoomed to a normal level, let's say showing 5 or 10 minutes, then you would probably see a difference by installing an Nvidia card.

I edit 5DII footage on a mac. CS5.5 gave me results that were comparable to your scrubbing demo. With CS6, it changed substantially and now scrubbing is as smooth as any other codec - much smoother than what you show. You mentioned you are editing on a MBP - that could be the deciding factor. I'm on an 8-core MacPro, and H.264 is very processor intensive (Yes, CUDA will not help with playback of the H.264, just with effects and other situations applied)

I would suggest either buying a different machine - Mac, PC, whatever - or transcoding your footage to ProRes if you are keeping your current machine. That will put less strain on your CPU and give you much better results with your current machine. Obviously, a trade-off with the time it will take to transcode, but there is no free lunch.